Damnation's Edge
by TheCyben
Summary: The Inquisition hunts heretics - but who is hunting them? One by one, the guardian's of Imperial purity are being snuffed out, victims of a relentless and damned strike-team. Bear witness to the hidden machinations of the Arcanii, the counter-inquisition wholly sworn to the Dark Gods...


**Case Notes – Appended by Nocturne Byss Olandra, Mind-Redactor to the Order of the Broken Knife**

The greatest weakness an Inquisitor can harbor is that of hubris. Our reach is long, our remit is absolute, our justice swift, our mercy scant. But we are still mere flesh and blood, my brothers. Heed this warning – _we are hunted._

Whispers trace the outline of a shadow society – the Hidden Order, the Cultmasters, the Scattered Coven – which is inverse in structure and intent to our own. Just as the branches of a mighty oak reach for the light, so too do its roots twist down toward dark places. So do the Arcanii mirror the workings of our own Holy Office.

None have yet been captured. None have been identified. And yet they must exist! They _must!_ I see the shadow of their galaxy-spanning web in my dreams, and I shudder.

It only proves my argument that you call my revelations 'delusional', 'paranoid'... 'deranged'.

You will see. Or rather, _you won't_. All you will feel is the knife in the dark...

_The last writings of Inquisitor Jurgaan Seng, Ordo Hereticus _

**Target One – Arn Calyx**

The creature had filed its teeth to points. They glistened wetly in the dark, a knife-slash of pearly sharp enamel. The creature was _amused._

Its oil-drop eyes were unblinking as it regarded him, folded in bruise-purple hollows of twitching flesh. It witnessed his disgust, and it laughed.

"Brand me a heretic, then, if you must. Call me unnatural, perverted... _Degenerate_, I've heard, is the word the priesthood favour. Just remember that you set this all in motion."

Rolls and folds of oiled and tattooed flesh shifted in the half-light, a rose-tinted gloom veiled in incense smoke. Kael Orbiq wrinkled his nose in distaste at the sickly-sweet smell of it – the scent seemed to carry with it an undertone of open plague-pits. He coughed, clearing his throat.

"It's not my place to call you anything other than _master_, my Lord. And far above my humble station to tell you what you are."

Tattoos writhed and coupled as the man on the dais heaved himself upright, fingers the size of other men's forearms scrabbling at the slippery marble and ivory.

"But do you know what I'm _becoming_, Orbiq? Your associates have far surpassed my wildest imaginations." Orbiq's pale lips twitched down into a grimace again as his Master giggled to himself. "And I'm sure you know how wild my imaginations can be, hmm?"

Kael knew. He'd had to clean away the... _pieces_. Had to pay off the families when the Arbites came sniffing, and more.

"I'm pleased that you find my efforts so rewarding, my Lord. Will our mutual friends be joining us tonight?"

Kael heard them behind his back before the Master – Lord De'Averos Greshin – could reply. Satin on leather, and footfalls light as snowflakes on water... but he heard. In order to save himself from the knives, he pretended not to.

"I'm afraid we must, my dear Landgraeve. Our masterpiece is at a very fragile stage in his metamorphosis right now, and we wouldn't want him to be... damaged."

The voice was a sigh and a song at once, subtly mocking. Kael twitched his head around just in time to watch Gisandre tuck her hands back into the sleeves of her shimmering robe, accompanied by the flash of steel. _That_ one knew almost too much.

And as for her brother...

"We are artists, not butchers like you hyuu-man animals. Gatekeepers of the divine!"

Kael smirked. Only the fallen Eldar could make 'human' sound like the name of a virulent disease.

"Well put, Telith. It's good to know that I've brought Lord Greshin the very best." He turned to face the other Xeno, a whip-thin and smirking thing wearing little but straps and rags. Telith's body was tattooed with intricate alien formulae – the same eye-watering scrawl which covered Greshin from eyebrows to ankles. Only the crown of his head remained bare.

"It's immaterial," huffed the shadowed figure of the Planetary Governor, settling back across his throne. "Gisandre, Telith – play nicely with poor Orbiq, won't you? He is not as us... not yet!"

Anyone else would have missed the flicker of violet eyes, and the self-satisfied little look which passed between the two xenos. Then again, anyone else would never have dared to bring these three maniacs together in the pressure-cooker world of Spire-Cluster Nine-Three Ascendant. Anyone else would have plunged naked into the warp to put this damned world behind them.

Kael Orbiq, however, was quietly enjoying himself. Behind his mask (rogue trader; sometime pirate; friend of xenos and notorious slaver), Kael's mind was a blur of oiled gears, counting down as the Governor's private chamber slid down its mag-rails and into the Perfumed Garden below.

He was angling, and the bait was in the water. Perhaps this time he'd pull in more than an empty, bloodied hook...

Before his smile betrayed him the hiss and clang of immense docking clamps broke his reverie. The chamber settled onto its shock absorbers with a groan, and the ivory-paneled walls clicked and slid away.

Noise washed in with a strobe-burst of flickering lights, followed by an airborne spray of heady olfactules – engineered drugs which made the blood sing in Orbiq's temples.

The music was a physical force – a sledgehammer bass track pounding relentlessly as Greshin's noble subjects danced.

Kael felt the line twitch against his fingers.

"Come now! Let us show my people what artistry you command! I feel like being _adored_, Landgraeve Orbiq. Tonight more so than ever!"

Servomotors whined as a brace of filigree legs socketed out from either side of Lord Greshin's throne, lurching his bulk up off the floor. Telith and Gisandre played at subservience, moving to each side of their living masterpiece and taking up a pair of intricately wrought staves, each one adorned with carnal scenes in gold and lapis. From their crowns depended fat bunches of cathetered plastic sacs... the potent antivirals and medicaments which kept Greshin alive.

Kael struggled to keep his face impassive as his Master rode forth into the light, the legs of his throne clicking and squealing against the marble tiles. He wasn't moved by the spectacle of watching a pair of proud Kabalites serve a mere human – after all, that was just another game. No – Orbiq was perfectly horrified at what the xenos had done to De'Averos Greshin. It was the first time he'd felt true horror for many long years, and so he savored it.

The Governor's body was swollen and slick, inked with alien calligraphy which seemed to squirm away from Orbiq's gaze. Here and there the Dark Eldar aesthetes had pierced rolls and folds of his flesh with golden rings, or scarified anguished faces into his skin. One of his legs hung bloated and useless down the front of the throne – a rubber-sheathed stump pierced by sheaves of transparent tubes. The other was tucked up as if Greshin sat in meditation – as pale and perfect as the limb of an alabaster statue. The same was true of his arms – one tumorous and vast, skewered with jeweled needles, the other lithe and muscular. The slim fingers at the end of that arm reached out and plucked a flute of amasec from a blind servitor's tray, bringing it up to lips which were only half there.

"Do you see, my dear Orbiq? I am becoming one of them. Soon, so soon... but for now, I can share a little of my beauty with my loving subjects."

He was almost right. One half of the Governor's skull was indeed a mockery of the alien angles and planes of an Eldar face. How many hours had Telith been in there with the grinders and drills to achieve such a subtle parody? It would explain the sounds of pained ecstasy which had kept him awake these past few nights in his guest-chamber. It was the other half which made him almost lose his composure, though – the hacked, mangled topography of bruises and stitches spiraling in to that lidless black eye. More tubes pierced him there, and there, and there... more wires hung with flickering pinprick lights.

Like Telith, Greshin's tattoos only reached the level of his eyesockets. But unlike the xeno outcast the crown of his skull was not bare skin. A gilded halo was bolted to the Governor's spine, a great eight-pointed wheel hung with glittering chains. And from these chains, hooks. And from these hooks, quivering taut against the strain, eight bloody petals of scalp, peeled back to reveal a dome of polished bone. They had inset it with platinum and chalcedony, in the shape of a forbidden rune.

"Do you like it, Landgraeve? We're always open for business, you know."

Gisandre's eyes were shadowed by the cowl of her robe, but her cruel little mouth was set in a predatory grin. Was _she_ tattooed all over? Kael was sure to find out would mean death.

"I think he's coming along marvelously," said her brother. "And I'm _certain_ his dear guests will think so too."

Telith followed at the side of the throne as it picked its way down a flight of mirror-polished steps and into the Perfumed Garden, but he turned aside as he passed Orbiq, dragging him along in his wake.

"How much longer, human? It's all I can do to keep him alive, you know. And without a tame Lord your promises are nothing!"

"Quietly!" sub-voxed Kael, falling back out of step with the Master's throne. Greshin had engaged a group of drug-twisted courtiers in what was sure to be a one-sided conversation – there was no telling what the fools thought they were looking at, but in their narcotic stupor _everything_ was haloed in beauty.

"The prisons are full to bursting – I've used his signet to authorize a purge of the underhive. Those redemptionist fanatics cut a little too close to the bone with their latest sermons."

"Don't whet my appetite," spat the xeno. "We must finish this soon! I'm sure there are enough slaves for both of us, 'Landgraeve'. Or does that foolish title please you a little too much?"

Kael pretended to fuss at a cluster of pulsing tubes, following them with a finger down the side of the throne.

"The ships can hold more. I'll stack them like cordwood if I have to. All you have to do is keep up your little charade of Eldar history."

"And look where our history got us, human! Nursemaid to a mad, rotting corpse! My Archon would laugh himself to death if he knew how far I'd fallen, and as for my..."

The Eldar never got to finish.

At that moment the dome-wall of the Perfumed Garden erupted inward, sending panels of woven diamond scything through the crowd. Libertines and concubines were sheared in half as smoke billowed, blasting away the drug-laced incense.

Black figures stormed through the breach, hulking things with lesser shadows scuttling in their wake. Orbiq heard the sound of vox-casters blaring out a litany of execration, and he slid into cover just in time to watch tongues of muzzle-flash lick out, stitching bolts across the field of flesh.

De'Averos Greshin roared, alone at the centre of the storm. Around him his guests were mown down – plucked from their feet by bolterfire only to explode an instant later. Cherry blossoms drifted down amid a rain of blood as the slayers gathered their harvest, all the while intoning their prayer to the sacred God-Emperor of Man.

Bone chips sprayed. Kael Orbiq kept his head down.

"Fools! What have you done? I'll have you _flayed_ for this transgression! Flogged! Quartered!" The Planetary Governor's nightmare face was twisted up with rage as he swung his throne about, weathering a hail of fire. Hidden shield generators of Gisandre's design projected a shimmering wall in front of him, and it rippled like water as bolt after bolt hammered home. "Do you pious thugs not know _fine art_ when you see it?"

"I know damnation, Lord Greshin. I know _heresy!_ And by the power vested in me by the most holy office of the Ordo Hereticus, I adjudge thee as Abominatus in Extremis – lost from the light of our Immortal Emperor, and Excommunicatus from any possible salvation."

Orbiq knew that voice. So weary, so sad... so filled with unshakable self-righteousness!

Inquisitor Arn Calyx. The man they called the 'Emperor's Bloodhound' out here among the Veil Stars. The man who'd put an entire hive city to the torch on Rhyozan for apostasy.

The man who this entire perverted pleasure-garden was designed to entrap.

Calyx punctuated his proclamation by drawing a pistol from his belt and absently pumping a round into the skull of the planet's Pontifex. The old preacher died tangled up among the bodies of two dead courtesans, his cloth-of-gold robes flapping open.

"You as well?" mourned Calyx as he handed the gun to one of his hunch-backed servitors. "The snares of ruin are subtle - aren't they De'Averos? Unfortunately redemption is very, _very_ blunt."

Down in the cover of a shattered marble pillar, Telith drew a pair of sharp little pistols from somewhere among the rags and leather which passed for his clothing.

"I'm not going to ask where you were keeping those," said Orbiq. "But what good are they going to do you?"

The Dark Eldar grinned – a singularly unpleasant sight.

"I don't need the witch-sight to see that you were expecting our friend out there. Which means while you're busy getting yourself killed, I'm getting off this accursed rock."

Kael nodded, priming his own weapons. His plasma pistol's damascened snout began to glow from within as it built up a killing change, and the force rapier in his other hand crackled with power.

"Stay close then. And Telith..."

"Yes?"

"The Inquisitor is mine. Don't worry – I'll see to it that his torments surpass even what Gisandre could do to him."

As if invoked by her name the robed xeno slid into cover beside Orbiq, her sleeves rolled back to expose a set of bladed gauntlets. From fingertips to elbows Gisandre's arms were dripping red.

"So, you weren't a pathetic little trader after all? Too bad. I was going to enjoy the look on your face when I enslaved you with the rest of them."

Kael chuckled as bolterfire chewed a jagged line across the marble.

"How uncharacteristically honest of you. While we're having a heart-to-heart moment, just let me say I always thought you were a total bitc..."

The world went away for a second. Orbiq felt himself lifted from the ground as a shockwave rippled through the stone and steel of the Perfumed Garden, stripping a film of dust and blood from every surface. Purple starbursts flashed silently in his head as he staggered from cover, looking to see...

There.

Arn Calyx had missed.

The black-clad Bloodhound bulked out to eight feet tall in his ceramite armor, a beribboned and skull-etched variant of that worn by the damned Astartes. Now he knelt at the end of a mighty hammer-swing, the head of his gilded weapon buried a foot in the marble floor.

It seemed that redemption was very blunt indeed. Arn Calyx had deployed his signature means of dispatch – a gilded thunder hammer, usually used by armored Terminators to hunt war-machines. Some master craftsman must have tucked away tiny antigrav repulsors in its head, for now he swung it back one-handed, a look of honest despair on his face.

Greshin's shields were down. His throne cowered backward, legs scrabbling for purchase on the bloody marble.

"You two stay close," hissed Kael to his unwilling allies. "If I can touch him, I can kill him. But there are five of those damned pious marines out there, and they can shred us all with crossfire. I need you to clear a path for me."

Normally giving orders to Dark Eldar was a recipe for suffering. But the Kael Orbiq who faced them now was a world apart from the twitching, nervous slave trader who had met them out past Gyryon's Reach. He was still just a human being – a tall, thin man dressed in a long leather coat, its lapels dripping with the ribbons and seals of an inter-system trader. His face was still the same scarred roadmap of pale skin, puckered up around a jeweled monoculus, with the same nervous smile and crooked nose.

But there was steel in his voice now. There was a sense of tension in his every movement as he unfolded a little envelope of cloth from his pocket, snapping it out into a scarred and much-repaired Commissar's cap. The Aquila at its peak had been replaced with a lidless red eye.

"No arguments?" asked Kael Orbiq, gently settling it atop his head. "Good. When he finishes with dear old De'Averos, we'll..."

But it was too late for plans.

Gisandre vaulted the barrier with a war-cry that sent chills down Orbiq's spine, landing on the chest of an armored marine and wrapping her legs around his waist. The loyalist staggered as the Xeno planted a mocking kiss in the middle of his forehead – then drove two thin telescopic spikes out from her gauntlets and clean through his head.

Across the smoking ruin of the garden, other survivors took this as their chance to break and run. Arn Calyx even turned from his sorrowful prayers to watch his men lash out with bolterfire, scattering their own servitors and plucking fleeing, half-naked wretches from their feet.

Kael came up out of cover at the same time as Telith, but the Dark Eldar was faster and far more nimble. Before Orbiq could even aim and fire his plasma pistol the tattooed Kabalite was among his prey, sliding on one knee and leveling his own guns left and right at a pair of black-helmed marines.

The crack and sizzle of immense power reduced them to superheated ash in an instant, and Kael whistled appreciatively. Never judge a xeno weapon by its size!

His own plasma pistol seemed baroque and clumsy by comparison, but it saved Gisandre from death a second later as a robed gun-servitor turned to aim its weapons in her direction. The thing's face had been stretched and distended so that a heavy flamer dripped fire between its jaws, and its ribcage was filled with promethium tanks.

Plasma burnt a white contrail right through it.

Holy promethium burst wide, and Gisandre was propelled before the fireball. Spinning in midair, she brought her heel into shattering contact with another marine's jaw. His skull was flattened against the inside of his own shoulder pauldron.

"Always wear your helmet," chuckled Orbiq. "Those campaign studs don't look so valiant on a corpse!"

His own mark was a veteran in scarred ceramite armor – one who was smart enough to have his helmet locked down tight. The hulking warrior turned as he caught Orbiq's heat signature through the smoke, hefting a great underslung heavy bolter...

And four feet of power rapier ran him through, piercing the left eye of the Aquila on his plastron. Again, and it took the eagle's other eye, neatly skewering the marine's auxiliary heart.

Kael stepped over his prey as he crumpled to the floor, his sacred armor no defense against the blade. Now it was just him, the Kabalites - and Inquisitor Arn Calyx, standing defiantly among his retinue of scribe-servitors and mekanikal cherubim.

"I see you've finished the job. Good. I admire a man who can keep his focus under difficult circumstances."

Calyx frowned. It was a matter of much debate if he could express anything other than grief.

"It gives me no pleasure to execute the duties of my office, heretic," he said, loosening his thunder hammer from the wreckage of De'Averos Greshin. The golden maul came loose with an obscene sucking sound, pulled free from halfway through the Governor's chest. The blow had driven his half-formed skull down to his pelvis. "Though it does tempt me with the sin of pride to note that I have you out in the open at last. Our game ends here, Ka'elandros Orbiq."

"Your _game?_ What does he mean your game? I never..."

"Telith," said Orbiq. "Shut up. I'll tell you all about it - if and when we survive."

One of the scribe-servitors took down his every word. Camera lenses glittered under its cowl as its feather quill scratched across a roll of parchment.

It even caught the words which unleashed hell.

"Jewelsmith – lights out!"

Down among the roots of the spire, in a chasm reeking of kerosene and death, a bald-headed man in welding goggles unfolded himself from atop a three-storey tall generator core. There were too many limbs to his silhouette – and far too many of the insect-shadow arms which bristled from his back were tipped with blades.

"Aye, Captain. These boys were no challenge at all! I hope you've got something more entertaining for me next time..."

A hand which the Jewelsmith had not been born with threw the switch.

And the Perfumed Garden was plunged into darkness, eliciting screams from the dying and squeals from Arn's censer-swinging cherubs.

At once the other members of Orbiq's crew called in.

"I'm bringing the _Rumor_ down on your position," hissed the vox-bead nestled up against Kael's eardrum. "The port authority have cleared the _Cypher Echo_ for departure on a high ecliptic burn. E.T.A in ten."

"Thank you, Ilse. And how about you, Mr Steeplejack?"

"You're lit up like a Kirovastian brothel window, Captain. Would you like me to nail that puritanical freak to the floor for you?"

Orbiq smiled, even as he cleared the last few feet between himself and his prey. Steeplejack's rifle was accurate enough to trim the tip from a Vostroyan's mustachios from a mile out... there was a good reason why the grip on its bolt was carved from the ball of a human femur.

"Not yet, Jack. This one knows things. This one..."

He knew that it was a lie as soon as his hands close around the Inquisitor's throat. That touch should have caused massive feedback in Arn Calyx's brain, setting off a chain of aneurysms as his psychic power discharged.

Instead Kael Orbiq found himself staring into a hollow shell of a being – a great sucking void behind a mask of synthetic skin. His consciousness was pulled into that well of nothingness, tiny memories unraveling as he struggled to break free...

It was Gisandre who saved him. Sweet, predictable Gisandre, who would never follow orders if it meant missing an opportunity to kill.

Her telescopic spikes ripped the syntheflesh face of the doppelganger to pieces, and Orbiq came up gasping from the psychic abyss inside it. This is how it felt to have once been human. _This is how it felt to be erased and enslaved -_

"And that's what we have in store for you, Ka'elandros," laughed the Bloodhound. "Once we've wrung out your mind, we'll put your body to good use."

Orbiq dripped blood from his nose and mouth as he pushed away from the eight-foot armored bulk of Arn Calyx's decoy. But there was still enough bravado in him to raise a smile, even while he watched the hunched scribe-servitor unfold to its full height, peeling away a headset of spider-eye lenses. One of its cherub brothers flitted in tight circles overhead, providing illumination.

"I suppose my thoughts _were_ quite loud just then, Calyx. That was a trap worthy of my own design."

The real Inquisitor carried far less ordnance than his immense body-double. But the pistol he used to keep Gisandre at bay was more than powerful enough to reduce her to a crimson fog.

"For consorting with aliens alone I should have to kill you, Orbiq. And they would join you in death, if it wasn't for their predictably mercenary nature. It was the one called _Telith_ who informed my Ordo of your presence here. Otherwise this little operation to excise the late Lord Greshin would have been postponed... until we could justify razing this whole rotten hive."

"What happened to purging the Xeno for the good of the Imperium?"

"Politics happened," shrugged Calyx. "We of the Hereticus have bigger problems than how many eyes and arms our prey were born with. Creatures like _you_ are far more dangerous than the dregs of a dead race, after all... you look just the same as we do."

"Telith!" shouted Gisandre into the smoking dark. "Brother, what have you done?"

The Inquisitor chuckled, raising a sad little smile. The face under his sackcloth hood was just as careworn and self-satisfied as the mask which hung ragged on his decoy.

"By all accounts of your race's loyalty he must be miles away by now. But _you_ will help us with our inquiries, girl. Long has our holy office desired a way into the Dark City."

Outside the dome of the Perfumed Garden, the Dark Eldar exile named Telith unfastened a section of panel from the smooth skin of the spire. Underneath was a folded skyboard – a wicked, razor-edged antigravity device. He quickly unfolded its wings and risked a look over the parapet, ready to leap off into the stinging rain.

Mr Steeplejack had heard everything through Kael Orbiq's vox-link. And while his Captain was currently indisposed, he was nothing if not a man of great initiative.

The rifle in his hands was a flat slab of darkness six feet long, and it spat a single spiral-cut woven diamond spike at many times the speed of sound. The bullet entered Telith's chest by way of a shattered collarbone, and as soon as it had screwed its way deep into the strata of flesh within tiny heat-sensors in its casing registered the warmth of his internal organs.

There was just time for the Exile's violet eyes to register the shock.

Thousandths of a second after the bullet had found its mark, a wet, messy explosion painted the wall of Spire-Cluster Nine-Three Ascendant blood red. Steeplejack worked the bolt, secure in his sling of artificial spider silk half a mile further up the tower.

"Just give me the word, Kael. I've got one more for your loyalist friend down there..."

But Orbiq was in no position to answer.

While Inquisitor Calyx kept Gisandre under the unwavering sights of his pistol, he drew forth from his servitor's robes a hematite rod which seemed to ripple with heat haze. Orbiq backed away slowly as Arn brandished it like a sword... he'd seen such things before, but not in human hands.

'Your colleagues back on Terra would _definitely_ not approve, Bloodhound. First you let one Xeno run free, then you openly claim to seek entrance to the darker wilds of the webway. Now, if I'm not mistaken, you're threatening me with a Warlock's weapon?"

"The end more than justifies the means in your case. Those who made this thing have no love for your corrupted Gods."

"And here I thought you were _such_ a good Puritan."

"Puritan perhaps. But Monodominant? I'm not mad enough to throw away a blade just because I could carelessly nick my own thumb with it."

He'd stalled as long as he could. Gisandre couldn't help him – for her to even twitch would be suicide. And while he knew that the Jewelsmith and Ilse were coming as fast as they could _(pict-feed – a blur of metal-plated corridors, knives on steel insect arms fogged with steam. Weather systems churning like the gears in some infernal engine as the assault cutter _Rumor_ fell in toward them, supersonic...), _and while he knew that Steeplejack would never miss, Kael knew that he had to feed on the mind of this driven, obsessive Inquisitor.

Perhaps it would open up new leads on new prey. Perhaps it would satisfy the hunger of those he unwillingly served. Perhaps... and this was closer to the truth – perhaps it would offer him some insight into his own dark obsession.

Orbiq's rapier moved too fast for unaugmented eyes to follow, piercing Arn's wrist and tearing out between his fingers. Along the way it split the ivory grip of his pistol, shattering its power pack. A single wild shot took Gisandre high in the shoulder, spinning her around and instantly cauterizing the fist-sized wound it had drilled through muscle and bone.

Neither of them screamed. In retrospect, that was the most frightening thing of all. But in the moment it was all Kael Orbiq could do to catch that hematite rod at the top of its swing, wrapping his hand around that of the Inquisitor.

He saw the tiny row of inlaid pearl teardrops welded to Arn Calyx's cheek reflect a white and raving light. He saw those thin, tight lips pull up into a rictus grin.

And then the power hit him with wrecking-ball force – a storm of agony which threw him halfway across the empty shell of the Perfumed Garden. The part of him who knew who he was cracked, fractures ramifying across his soul like lightning. For a bare instant he caught sight of the thing which was growing within – a thing all eyes and teeth and wet, pulsing darkness...

Then came oblivion.

Outside, under the blackened branches of a cherry tree, Inquisitor Arn Calyx slipped his forbidden alien weapon back into its scabbard. He watched impassively as a pair of cherubim fussed over his bisected hand, stitching it together with silken thread extruded from their fingers. He walked over to Orbiq's broken body as they worked.

"I thought your death would please me, Ka'elandros." He sniffed, shrugging his shoulders. "I suppose I was wrong. Oh well." The tiny servitor-angels finished their task, snipping off a twist of floating thread. Arn flexed his fingers, and another skull-faced infant flitted over to deposit a shiny new laspistol in his palm. "At least you've given me an interesting new scar."

Half a mile below, the Jewelsmith threw himself into a mag-lift cage, twisting the head of its operator a full three-sixty degrees with a sound like breaking matchwood.

Half a mile above, Mr Steeplejack's finger tensed against a trigger etched with tiny skulls.

Two vertical miles further, and Ilse Cadrian pushed the throttles of her void-black cutter up into the red. Rotary cannons slung under the _Rumor_'s bulbous nose hummed and clicked as they ran pre-combat checks...

While inside, Kael Orbiq tasted winter.

The trees in this place were little more than black scrawls against the driven snow – endless ranks of them fading off into a grey blur. Kael felt the weight of the hunting spear in his hands, and he remembered.

This wasn't reality.

It was a memory, and worse. This was his homeworld, and the Zygen was on his trail.

He spat blood, rolling the aches out of his neck. At least this time he wouldn't have to face the damned thing as a child. That is, if it was anything as mundane as four hundred pounds of deathworld predator-beast which was actually tracking him through his own mind. It could just as easily be Arn Calyx, or...

But it was best to not even think the names of _those_ things. Orbiq tightened his grip on the spear and turned, just in time to see four red-ember eyes appear out of the haze. Behind them bulked the Zygen, and all the weight of an old, cruel tradition.

They'd taken him in the middle of the night on his thirteenth name-day. Wrapped him in furs, scarified his forehead and arms with sigils of the Father-Beyond-The-Sky, and ceremonially bound his right hand to the shaft of a leaf-bladed hunting spear.

Then his father had told him to start running.

A half-hour later, the village shaman had thrown the bolts on the Zygen's cage... a beast captured and starved for the express purpose of chasing him down.

Later the scriptorians of the great library told him that only one in three boys ever came back from the Testing. That it was all about limited resources and coming of age, a tradition based upon a legend so old that it was rumored to have been brought with the colony ships from old Terra.

At the time he'd been given only one piece of wisdom, and it came back to him now with the scent of his father's damp furs and charcoal smoke.

"_The beast is implacable. It'll follow you until you can't run no more. Somewhere you have to turn and fight. Brave warriors turn right away, and they sometimes get lucky. Smart warriors... well, they turn where they find their killing ground. We get more smart ones back than brave ones."_

Which, according to the scriptorians, was rather the point.

Now Kael Orbiq scuffed a line in the snow with his boot, stepping back between the trunks of two ironwood trees. The Zygen was oily black, and muscles bunched and slithered under its pelt as it stalked forward, its eyes narrowed to slits. This was an old, battle-scarred male, and it had felt the kiss of the hunting spears before. Its breath steamed from a pair of wide, leathery nostrils, pluming in the cold air.

Orbiq took a tentative step away as the beast began to growl...

And then he slipped.

The Zygen's lips parted in what looked suspiciously like a grin of triumph. Then its immense hind legs propelled it into the air, claws splayed, eyes flashing in the pale sunlight.

Kael's spear came up in a blur of powdered snow, aimed right at its silvery underbelly. The leaf-shaped blade went in smooth, twisting, as four hundred pounds of unstoppable force impaled itself on the spiked spear-shaft. Leverage did the rest. With a final lunge Kael wedged the beast's broad shoulderblades between the two trees, rolling out from underneath it.

"There! Are you satisfied? Calyx? If this is the afterlife, I want my Gods-damned money back!"

He was panting, bloodied, his long leather coat spattered with Zygen blood and his boots filled with melting snow. But it wasn't Arn Calyx who answered him.

"And so you turned to face the beast yet again, child. How _informative_. Isn't it _satisfying_ when we can cut to the very root of who you are? You mortals are just sad little collections of stories held together by gristle and skin... at least in my experience."

The voice was a little girl's laughter and the rumble of tectonic plates all at once. A chorus sliding into his thoughts like a sliver of glass. Orbiq knew its name.

"A'pharaen! I should have..."

"Shhh. No names! That other beast is still stalking you outside, dear one." The disembodied voice giggled, setting Kael's teeth on edge. "I just wanted to offer my assistance. It looks like you need it."

"Not from you. Not this time. I..."

"You're _dying_, Orbiq. That puts pride off the list. Why do you think I found you here?"

"Because you're a mind-twisting Daemon? Because you like to manipulate people's memories?"

This time A'pharaen's laughter crystallized into a physical form. Suddenly a collection of knurls and knots in the trunk of an ironwood had _always been_ the outline of a tall and hunch-backed creature with hands like skeletal claws.

"You think _I_ chose this place? No, Kael Orbiq. This is just you trying to tell yourself something. Some kind of punch-drunk fable out of your subconscious. Which is not to say that it isn't _fascinating._"

Behind him the Zygen's feeble thrashings were growing weaker. Some internal illogic of the dream slotted into place, and he realized that the creature's time was also his own.

"All right. But I know your kind of charity doesn't come for free, daemon. Tell me your price."

It should have been impossible for a thing with a cruel, hooked beak to smile, but A'pharaen managed a sickly grin nonetheless. Under the cowl its head was that of a long-dead hunting bird, all iridescent blue feathers and mummified skin. Its eyes were filled with stars.

"Oh Kael! And I thought I was the very _soul_ of generosity! You must have me confused with some other Daemon!" Suddenly it was behind him, without appearing to have moved at all. A long-fingered hand plucked the cap from his head as another ran its fingers across his scalp. "Oh yessss. We see it now. A little treat for one of my master's old friends. The Young Prince will be most pleased with this one..."

Images burst behind his eyes like blood underwater. Gisandre's face. Gisandre's mocking little smile. And behind her, ever present, a shadow which wasn't her own. Kael Orbiq knew the name which her people gave that shadow, and he shuddered despite himself.

"Very well. It is done. Her soul for mine, A'pharaen. So long as Calyx dies."

The Daemon oozed around beside him, its serpentine neck coiling up and out until its head was level with his own. A skeletal hand patted him on the cheek.

"Good boy. That's what we wanted to hear. Now, go and enjoy your little revenge, child. I'll be waiting for you... next time you need my help."

Another hand clapped his stitched-up Commissar's cap back on top of his head, and then...

He came up gasping for air, as if he'd been drowning in his own memories. Out here, in the Real, only fractions of a second had passed. Arn Calyx - as regal and cold in his servitor's sack-cloth as he would have been in full Inquisitorial black - racked the primer on his laspistol and took aim, mumbling some pious execration under his breath.

"Good. You lived. I couldn't have you dying without hearing the rites of purification, Orbiq. It's my duty to shrive your soul, not just blow holes through your body."

Kael sat up. His limbs were shaking as if with a fever, and his heartbeat pounded loud and irregular in his skull. Bloody tears carved tracks through the grime on his face.

"Calyx," he slurred. "Shut up before I have to hurt you."

The Inquisitor just laughed. But now Orbiq was crawling, dragging his body over to where Gisandre lay, unconscious.

"What's this?" chuckled Calyx. "Was there more to your traitorous liaison than just _business_, Kael? And here I thought you a heartless beast..."

The Dark Eldar's eyes flickered open as Orbiq's shadow fell across her, but she was barely there. Her pupils narrowed to pinpricks as combat drugs tried to kickstart her nervous system.

"Is he dead, human? Did you kill him?"

"No. The Inquisitor's right behind me. He's..."

"_Damn_ the Inquisitor. I mean... my brother. Did he..?"

"Dead and gone, Gisandre. And I'm sorry."

"Sorry? I _wanted_ him dead, you stupid creature! Don't apologize."

"Not for that," said Orbiq, pulling the glove from his left hand with his teeth. "For _this_."

Arn Calyx saw it from behind, so all he caught of the psionic blast was a curling shockwave, rippling out from Kael's hand in silence. An icy wind seemed to blow right through his body as all the shadows were pulled tight, feathered away to rags by the strobe-flash light of it in the gloom.

He fancied he heard Lord Greshin's dead courtiers screaming. He thought he could hear the anguish of his own Marine retinue fading behind them.

And as Kael Orbiq held out his hand in front of Gisandre's face, five tiny eyes split open at the tips of his fingers and thumb. The iris of each one was full of stars.

The Kabalite's eyes widened with unaccustomed terror as Kael turned away, his fingers sinking in through her skin, through her skull… pushed through bone and muscle as if they were warm wax. Her limbs thrashed for an instant, hands clenched into fists, and then it was over. Arn Calyx heard the hollow, mocking laughter of something vast and hungry as Orbiq pulled his hand free, leaving Gisandre's face a horrified death-mask.

He, too, knew the name of that eldritch being, and it was only centuries of discipline which kept him from speaking it aloud.

Glass shattered as its laughter blurred all the way up the scale and into pain. The lights of Arn's cherubim were snuffed out as his servitor-angels screamed and died.

But he saw the jeweled monoculus unscrew from around Kael Orbiq's left eye, bolts clicking and sliding as it hinged apart. A foul, diseased glow burned deep in the charred black socket behind it, turning the heretic's face into a nightmare.

"Do you think I wanted it this way, Calyx? Do you think I like to feel his bloody talons in my soul? _Do you?"_

Orbiq's bitterness cut like a lash. But the Emperor's Bloodhound hadn't become a feared Master of the Ordo Hereticus by backing down.

"What you want means nothing to the lurkers beyond, fool. But at least if I kill you cleanly I'll deny them their true desire!"

Kael stood, popping the aches and pains out of his joints. All of a sudden he seemed taller, broader – a shadow cloaked in shadows, dripping tears of green witchfire.

"Mr Steeplejack – hold fast," he sub-voxed, holding his hand out, palm open. His rapier connected hilt-first, sending threads of lightning crawling up the sleeve of his coat. "I still want to pick this one's brains."

High atop the spire, the sniper pressed himself hard up against the cold metal wall. The rain was coming in sideways now, laced with flurries of razor ice.

"If you're certain, Cap. But make it quick. You're not going to like what's going on out here…"

"Why do they build these bloody towers so tall? So many stairs! I'm not _entirely_ made of steel, dammit…"

"Quit your whining, Jewelsmith! At least you don't have to worry about wind-shear slamming you into a thicket of aerials!"

"The gang's all here, Captain," said Steeplejack, as the focus rings of his amplifex goggles whirred and clicked. "Problem is, so's the local Auxilia."

And here they came. A crawling ribbon of olive drab metal, boots and helmets and shouldered rifles, drawing up to the three-hundred foot doors of Spire-House Greshin.

Kael Orbiq didn't have the time or inclination to give them a second thought.

With a gesture of his left hand he tore the laspistol from Arn Calyx's grasp, crushing it into a ball of molten steel. The Inquisitor hissed, throwing up his psychic defenses, and the air between them came alive with writhing sparks.

"You can't hope to survive, Ka'elandros! Strike me down and there will be another Inquisitor on your trail tomorrow!"

"Oh, I count on it. I _enjoy_ it! Why do you think I leave you pious bastards nailed to the walls in pieces?"

Arn's alien weapon blurred across in a flat arc, shattering Orbiq's mental shields. The rod screamed like a burning child as feedback rimed it with ice.

"Submit to the Emperor's mercy, and you will die absolved! Oblivion awaits you, rather than eternal damnation!"

"Stop praying and start _fighting_, Calyx! I didn't come here for a sermon…"

Rapier and force rod met with a thunderclap, sending strobe-light shadows flickering away into the dark. Again and again the two men struck, parried, sidestepped, feinted – a blur of motion lit by sparks. Ghostly faces swirled up like smoke as Kael's sword ground against alien metal. With a heave he flung the Inquisitor back, witchfire flaring from his hollow eye socket.

"You can do better than that – even without your xeno trinket. _Come on!"_

Calyx only snarled, redoubling his attack. He rained down a flurry of blows – an overhand looped into a backhand swipe and a vicious cross... every one of them blocked, turned aside with a skirling shower of sparks. At last his rage overcame him, and the Bloodhound raised the force rod over his head, chanting a prayer to his God-Emperor.

It may as well have been a dirge. The alien runes etched into the weapon's shaft blazed white for an instant as he held it high, and then he brought it down against Orbiq's guard with a wild, inhuman cry.

At the last instant before it struck home, the heretic angled his blade just so, presenting its diamond-hard edge. He whispered a certain Name under his breath.

And the force rod shattered. Both warriors felt the stuff of their very souls pulled tight as generations of dead Warlocks screamed, from a place beyond things as simple as life and death. Then Kael Orbiq's blade was at his enemy's throat.

Arn smiled, even though that tiny movement was enough to break the skin and send blood dripping down the heretic's blade. His eyes twitched down, and Kael's followed.

He saw the black dagger pressed up against his side – the seal of the Ordo Hereticus winking in the light of his daemon eye.

"You're nowhere near as foolish as you look, my lord Inquisitor."

"Shall we dispense with these toys, then? Mind against mind, Orbiq... or are you afraid my faith will crush your faithlessness?"

Kael's smile, when it came, was as chilling a sight as Arn Calyx had beheld in all his years of service to the Throne. A second later a thin, impossibly sharp rapier clattered to the bloody marble floor, along with a black-bladed Inquisitorial dagger.

The Jewelsmith met the first of their unwanted guests three floors below the Perfumed Garden – a strike team of Arbites still dripping from the toxic rain outside. Their commander barely had time to point his finger at the pale little man in the oversized goggles before things went terribly wrong.

"_You there!_ What the hell's going on up on level two-thirty-nine? And what in the name of..."

"Shh," said the Jewelsmith, as what appeared to be a nondescript backpack slung across his shoulders unfolded... and unfolded... and unfolded again into an intricate daisyhead of sharp and nasty futures. "You had it right first time. Hell is _exactly_ what's going on up there."

A great many very unpleasant things happened all at once.

Up above, Mr Steeplejack had problems of his own.

"Team, I've got one inbound. I don't think it's the kind you can just assassinate..."

The sound of howling turbines came swinging in above him in a cloud of rain-scattered light. All at once the storm-lashed night was lit up like noonday, and the sniper was pinned to the wall by targeting lasers.

"_That's not one of ours!" _

"_Well of _course_ he's not... listen, _I'm_ the superior officer on this damned thing, and I say..."_

The crackling vox-system of the Valkyrie threw the words of its crew off into the night, their bickering torn away in a storm of jet exhaust. It was only the frantic efforts of a pilot, hunched behind the machine's rain-streaked canopy, which kept its wing-mounted rocket pods aimed in anything like the right direction.

Steeplejack smiled and dropped his rifle, letting it fall away on a length of spider-silk cord. There was nothing to do but put his hands up over his head – those pods were scattershot, high explosive for shredding armored transports. Even if wind-shear blew them sideways they'd still make a mess of him.

"_Surrend... oh, all right. He already has."_

"_Good! No, I _don't_ know how we're going to get him down! That's your problem, Captain, not mine!"_

Another voice cut in over the blast of the engines – one nowhere near as self assured as that of the unseen squadron commander.

"_Ummm... what's he_ pointing_ at, Sir? I think you should..."_

Steeplejack gave them a little wave as the clouds burst open, spiraling apart in a whirlpool funnel. Red hot and falling fast, the _Rumor_ pulled itself up short right behind the Valkyrie, stabbing plumes of rocket exhaust from the retro brakes in its belly. Ilse Cadrian's pride and joy was four times the size of the little Imperial transport, and it loomed behind the Valkyrie's double tailboom like some deep-sea predator, its twin bulbous control hemispheres glowing from within.

"I thought you'd never make it," sub-voxed Mr Steeplejack, this time with a much more sincere smile. "How's the traffic up there?"

"The usual. Taking a detour to save your sorry hide, Steeplejack. That's so many drinks you owe me you're going to have to buy a brewery."

Twin engines coughed and roared as the Valkyrie came about, slipping sideways with a flick of its wings. Rockets chuffed from their housings on bursts of compressed air, lighting up to hiss across the gap and strike _Rumor_'s shields in a rolling barrage. Under the storm of tiny munitions Steeplejack could hear the rhythmic thump of the aircraft's underslung autocannon hammering hard.

It was a bold move, and some impressive flying. But the sniper was hardly worried about Ilse's chances of survival. In fact, seeing as one or two of those autocannon rounds had actually chipped _Rumor_'s paintwork, all he was concerned about was minimizing his blast profile.

Ilse's vengeance was swift.

The cannons which hung under the snub nose of _Rumor_ were torn from the wreckage of a super-heavy troop transport – spoils of war Orbiq's little crew had had claimed for some half-forgotten assignment. The Jewelsmith had been most insistent that they take these ugly, sawn-off things rather than diamond plate or gold.

Now they began to spin, spitting ten feet of muzzle flash across the gap between the two mismatched craft. Great fist-sized holes peppered the fuselage of the Valkyrie, and a wet red explosion within cut the squadron commander off in mid-scream. Three hundred mega-bolter rounds gutted the flyer in midair, punching the turbofans of its engines all the way through its exhausts.

Flames boiled out through the wreck's shattered canopy as it lurched sideways across the sky, slamming into Greshin's spire as it fell. Rain hissed and evaporated on the hot muzzles of Ilse's guns.

"Feeling a little impotent, Jack?" laughed the pilot, swinging the huge bulk of _Rumor_ around with precisely measured grace.

"Huh! Waste of bullets. Anyone can solve a problem by throwing enough frag at it."

The assassin was smiling as he spoke, though... and he reeled in his own six-foot exitus rifle as he stepped lightly across onto the tip of the cutter's wing. "Speaking of massive overkill, how are we going to keep these guardsmen off our backs while the Captain takes care of business? I'm not sure even _you_ have enough ammunition for that order."

There was a moment of silence during which Steeplejack was sure that Ilse was working out the calculations in her head. The vox hummed, warm against his eardrum.

"I suppose you're going to tell me _you_ have an idea?"

Mr Steeplejack's grin was the only visible part of his face against the darkness – the rest was all skin-tight leather and blacked-out amplifex goggles. He slammed a magazine of diamond bullets home, each multi-stage munition the length of a grown man's forearm.

"Sister," he said. "I have a whole clip full."

Half mile below his guard-issue hobnails the dome of the Perfumed Garden was lit up from within, beams and shafts of light stabbing out through the bullet holes in its walls. A pall of sickly steam plumed up above the Garden like an anvilhead – the battle within was melting the crust of dirty ice which had settled across it.

There was no time for words now. No curses or prayers could fit through the seamless concentration of the two combatants, each one locked, unblinking in a duel of minds.

The marble ran like candle wax beneath their feet, bellied out into a shallow dish. Neither Orbiq's or Arn's feet were touching the floor in any case; they hung in midair, skeletal black stickmen slashed across a globe of flame. Sick purple and actinic white energy meshed and whorled across its surface, sometimes twisting up into spikes of power. When these earthed themselves they cracked the trunks of charred cherry trees, stripped the bones of corpses and shattered statues to flinders.

All the water had boiled away from De'Averos Greshin's ornamental pools. Exotic fish lay gasping for breath as they were cooked alive.

Inside the fire Kael Orbiq felt much the same. Arn Calyx possessed a mind like the core of a plasma generator – wheels within wheels of red-hot metal spinning on the axis of his faith. His was not the finesse of a sorcerer – the deception and trickery Kael had learned over long years of servitude. His was a mind as blunt as the redemption he promised, and it was relentless.

Kael knew he would only get one change to breach the Inquisitor's mental shields. And the risk he'd have to take was dire. But without the secrets behind those mournful eyes, there was no way his plans could go any further.

So, as Arn Calyx hammered home his will once again against Orbiq's defenses, the heretic let them fracture. He staggered back, his boots hissing and melting as they touched the red-hot tiles.

And he spoke, letting his concentration slip. Raving white fire shattered his power into fragments. It burned down his throat as he screamed those three fatal words, filling his body with blind, savage energy.

"_Khahexiath! S'sembithaa! _A'pharaen!_"_

The fire which whipsawed through his body was the very mind of Inquisitor Arn Calyx, the Emperor's Bloodhound. Three hundred years of righteous fury and dutiful rage poured into two mortal forms at once.

Except that one of them – the smoking husk of Ka'elandros Orbiq – was now host to an Elder Daemon of the Architect of Fate.

His right hand was a crooked claw as it closed around Arn Calyx's throat. His left burned with cold blue fire, tongues of flame dripping upward from the star-hung eyes in his fingertips. Kael and his daemon patron howled with one voice as that fire twisted itself up into an impaling spike, and their howl became a scream of joy as they drove it clean through the Inquisitor's forehead.

He could feel the warp-energies of A'pharaen forcing his soul out of his flesh. He could feel cells dividing and nerves forking, his bones twisting inside their sheathes of muscle. A thing like the Lord of Change was not meant to inhabit human skin, and if A'pharaen lingered a second too long in the Real then Kael would regress into mindless spawn around him.

But the look of utter horror on Calyx's face was so very sweet. That drillbit of blue fire tore his mind apart in a silent explosion, stripping the globe of power away from around both of them. Where its shockwave passed, broken corpses stirred and dead eyes blinked back bloody tears...

"_It is done, sweet slave of mine! One day I'll show you what we could become together, Kael Orbiq. One day I will walk reality inside your skin!" _The daemon laughed, and Kael's lips pulled back from his teeth in sympathy. _"But not today. You have work to do, child. And a single Eldar soul only buys you so much of my power..."_

From down at the gates of Spire-house Greshin the explosion was almost beautiful.

Sixty thousand woven diamond panels were torn from their framework, glittering in the light of a cobalt-blue fireball. They fell like snowflakes, scattered across the steel foothills of the hive to the song of emergency sirens.

Ilse Cadrian swung wide, slipping in over the ruin of the Perfumed Garden as Orbiq staggered to his feet.

"If you're done with the pyrotechnics, we have a flight to catch, Captain," she voxed. "Did you get what you came for?"

Kael looked up into the light flooding down from the assault cutter's belly hatch. He felt like the inside of an Ogryn's punching bag, and the taste of hot tin and carrion was foul in his throat. But the information he needed burned hot and bright at the centre of his mind. Nothing else mattered – at least for now.

"Drop the ladder, Ilse. We're done here."

"_NO! _You... you won't get away that easily! You'll burn for your heresy, witch! I'll... I'll..." The Bloodhound's voice trailed away into a racking cough, doubling him over on his hands and knees. Somehow Arn Calyx had survived, and by a monumental effort of will he dragged himself to his feet, fixing Kael with a gaze half zealotry and half madness. "Your daemon tricks won't work this time, Ka'elandros! Not against good cold steel..."

There was a dagger clenched in his fist – a sigil of imperial piety burning on its blade. Kael Orbiq knew he didn't have the strength left in him to go another round – let alone the time.

"I'm sorry it had to end this way," he said, reaching out to grab the bottom rung of Ilse's trailing ladder. "You were well worth the hunt, Calyx. But as my father used to say – it's the smart ones who come home, not the brave ones."

The Inquisitor raised his blade high with a guttural scream. And behind him the air shimmered, boiling away from a figure all many-jointed insect arms, blades, and vast black welding-goggle eyes.

The Jewelsmith's real hands were pressed together in prayer, but four of his manipulators held short, brutal stub guns. Their muzzles kissed the back of the Bloodhound's head at the same time, stopping him in mid-strike.

"Omnissiah be with you, my lord. Your information goes on, though your body dies."

The four shots rang out as one, and the wreckage of Arn Calyx slumped to the floor, headless. Whirring, clicking manipulator arms stripped the sigils of his office and rank from his coat as the Jewelsmith knelt, setting a featureless black cube atop a little tripod.

"These Inquisitors like to work in privacy, see? So with the right codes, we can broadcast a little misinformation. Keep those footsloggers at the gates confused for just long enough."

Kael was up the ladder before the rogue Magus was finished. He slipped into the gunner's seat next to Ilse just as he felt the deceptive weight of the Jewelsmith scramble up behind him, making the assault cutter dip in the air.

"Do you think we can make it back to the _Cypher Echo_ before they box us in?" he asked, slumping back wearily against his straps. "I don't really feel up to high-G maneuvers right now..."

Isle tucked a strand of pale blonde hair back under her pilot's cap and pushed the cutter's plasma reactors to full load. Vast energies thrummed and pulsed behind the walls as she fixed Kael Orbiq with a bright and slightly unhinged smile.

"That's why I called my baby _Rumor,_ Captain. There's not a damn thing faster."

Later – as the _Contemptor_-class linerunner _Cypher Echo_ slipped through a very clumsy Imperial Navy blockade like ink through dark water – Kael Orbiq stood in front of a full-length mirror, an open bottle of vintage amasec in one hand and the other pressed up against the glass. Gilded cherubim leered down from the corners of its ornate frame.

The Arcanii was stripped to the waist, his lean and muscled torso cross-hatched with scars and fresh, bloody wounds. Angry thunderhead bruises traced their way across his ribcage and up to his neck, swelling the rows of metal plugs which were welded to his flesh. But it was none of these which made him take another pull from the bottle and groan, leaning his forehead against the mirror's cool surface.

There was no doubt about it. A'pharaen had left him a little token of their time together.

Pushing out through his tight, pale skin in clumps, straggling down the curve of his shoulderblades and spine... a cascade of iridescent blue feathers, forming the outline of wings.

Orbiq dropped the empty bottle to the floor and scrabbled for the room's intervox grille.

"Steeplejack! I'm in the third deck infirmary. I need you to bring me a stack of fresh towels, a bottle of Kirovastian grain spirits, and a pair of hook-nosed pliers."

He slid down the wall as the assassin's reply came blurring through the intervox, hashed with static.

"No... just leave them outside the door. And Steeplejack – no matter what you hear inside in the next hour or two... _don't come in_."


End file.
